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PETER HITCHENS: Jumping the traffic lights... and leaving our conscience behind

/li> 41 shares Pedestrian crossings (and traffic lights) seem to me to be rather wonderful things. By stopping at them, we recognise that we are all subject to the law

The big black car swept straight through a red light and on to the pedestrian crossing, just in front of me.

It was only thanks to luck and providence that nobody was hurt or even killed. The steady green man, which is supposed to mean that it is safe to cross, was clearly showing.

I called out to the driver, who looked guilty but drove on.

Then I saw, 20 yards away, a red police van, containing three officers in uniform. I tried to get their attention. By the time one of these surly public ‘servants’ had grudgingly wound down his window, the offender was well on his way down the road.

‘We’re doing something,’ the scowling constable said, with the air of an important person diverted from his important duties. It was true. They were doing something. All three of them seemed to be sending text messages on their mobile phones.

As it happens, this was one of three instances of drivers jumping red lights at pedestrian crossings which I saw last week.

One was a toffee-nosed Kensington lady (no doubt a stalwart of the Conservative Party) who was angry with me for catching up with her and rapping on her window. ‘How daih you touch my cah!’ she shrieked. Not a hint of shame or regret. How were these people brought up?

I can’t for the life of me see any difference between her and the foul-mouthed White Van Man who (later the same day) ploughed heedlessly through a different pelican crossing and swore unoriginally at me when I simply pointed at him.

PEDESTRIAN crossings (and traffic lights) seem to me to be rather wonderful things. By stopping at them, we recognise that we are all subject to the law, and that other people are just as important as we are. By not stopping at them, we scorn the law and assert that we are special.

And these days lots of people do not stop at them, and I think it matters a great deal.

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We are slowly becoming barbarians, even in Kensington, but not just there. It was the same week in which a teenage girl was mauled to death by a pack of dogs that no civilised person could possibly have wanted to own. It was the same week when the actor Clive Mantle had half his ear bitten off in a Tyneside hotel. Why? He asked some people in the corridor outside his room to make less noise.

And it was the same week the Government came up with its solution for the problems of the NHS. Make nurses do some actual nursing (you know, washing the patients). Make it a rule that hospital staff tell the truth (!). And set up yet another Stalinist inspectorate to check up on everyone.

Of course it won’t work. Like the useless police, the inspectors will always be ‘doing something’. The rules won’t be enforced. More people will die in filth and pain.

Because there is only one thing that really keeps us safe, on the roads, when we are ill, everywhere – and that is conscience. Conscience is what makes us observe red lights, what makes nurses do the dirty, smelly jobs, and tell the truth, and look tenderly after the helpless, querulous beings that most of us will one day become.

And conscience is dying among us, among Tory ladies and foul-mouthed White Van Men alike.

By a strange coincidence, conscience is dying more or less at the same time as the Christian religion is dying, and Easter is becoming just another chance to shop. Are these things connected? I suspect they are. While you wonder, take care crossing the road and don’t fall ill or get old, or ask anyone to be quiet.

 YET again the top universities are accused of being unfair to state school pupils. This is upside down.

The state schools are unfair to their pupils, by refusing to select on ability, by insisting on watered-down comprehensive schooling and by failing to tell the young that they need to take the tougher A-levels to get into the top colleges.

Why should good universities lower their standards to indulge this stupidity?

  A beautiful voice... belting out the familiar tune of tyranny

HAUNTING pictures of Peng Liyuan, China’s beautiful, musical and militarist First Lady, tell us a great deal about China.

Most importantly, they tell us that it is not a free country, and not likely to be. She sings on behalf of power. We used to believe that only free countries could become rich. China is ominous proof that this is no longer true.

And if that is so, how long will freedom survive when it has so many enemies?

Face of modern China: Peng Liyuan at a Communist Party rally

 

Silly anti-Russian prejudice led to suggestions that the unlovely plutocrat Boris Berezovsky had been rubbed out on Kremlin orders.

A much more likely explanation of his self-slaughter is the fact that he had recently begun taking ‘antidepressants’, which in many cases produce suicidal thoughts in people who hadn’t had them before.

So, I might add, had the tragic Donna Oettinger, who stepped in front of a train with her small son in her arms. She was taking a drug that has been linked in studies to an increased risk of suicide. When will they join up the dots? Coroners should be on watch for this.

 IT IS 50 years since Richard Beeching wrecked Britain’s railways. He was egged on by Transport Minister Ernest Marples, a shady and wicked man who profited personally from the building of motorways, which was the real reason for ripping up perfectly good train tracks.

Marples, as is not widely enough known, died abroad in disgrace, having fled the country to escape the taxman. I was just 12 years old when the railways were ruined, and I knew at the time that this was a great and tragic folly. All the grown-ups told me it was inevitable and necessary. Now, after half a century, I turn out to have been right. It’s the story of my life, really.

Now tell your husband who's to blame, Samantha

NOW that Samantha Cameron, right, has seen the miseries of Syrian refugees for herself, she should use her privileged position to tell her husband that this terrible crisis is largely his fault.

It is because Britain and others have been madly urging on the Saudi and Turkish-backed Islamist fanatics in Syria that a formerly peaceful and prosperous country has been turned into Hell.

And for what? If our supposed allies win, what sort of state will they create?

Samantha Cameron walks with Justin Forsth, CEO of Save the Children, through a refugee settlement in Lebanon, close to the Syria border

We need genius, not a good giggle

LONDON’S Mayor Al Johnson (his real name) is not a ‘nasty piece of work’. Mrs Johnson may have some harsh things to say about him (and to him) but he is in most matters a generous and thoughtful gent, made more likeable by a fine sense of the ridiculous. 

The really damaging truth about Al is that the laughter conceals neither a genius nor a gangster, but a dull and perfectly normal, boring Tory careerist with no original ideas about how to save the country. If only people would stop laughing for long enough to see that, the bubble would burst. 

As it is, I fear he will be swept to office on a wave of giggles, and only then be found out, which will be sad for him and us.

The colour's new, the madness isn't

LONG ago I lived in a mad country, where expensive bread was so heavily subsidised that it was cheaper than swill, and so fed to pigs.

It was called the USSR, and it was ruled by Red zealots. Now I live in another mad country, where Green zealots close perfectly good coal-fired power stations in the middle of a fuel shortage. 

It is like watching a dentist pulling out sound teeth, or a surgeon cutting off a healthy limb, and being able to do nothing to stop it.

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